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Tony Pearson is a Master Inventor and Senior IT Architect for the IBM Storage product line at the
IBM Systems Client Experience Center in Tucson Arizona, and featured contributor
to IBM's developerWorks. In 2016, Tony celebrates his 30th year anniversary with IBM Storage. He is
author of the Inside System Storage series of books. This blog is for the open exchange of ideas relating to storage and storage networking hardware, software and services.
(Short URL for this blog: ibm.co/Pearson )

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There's nothing worse that feeling you made a bad decision.My favorite is buying something, and then finding it at a lower price somewhere else. Or worse,being in a country where you haggle over prices, and finding out that I might havebeen able to haggle further down than what I had paid.

Of course, the solution to making better, more informed decisions, is getting more information.That's what I love about being in the storage business.[Read More]

A lot of people ask me about IBM branding, as we have recently changed brands. In the past we had two separate brands, one for servers (eServer) and one for storage (TotalStorage). These would be fine if we wanted to promote their independence, but customers today want synergy between servers and storage, they want systems that work well together.

Last year, in response to market feedback, we crated a new brand, "IBM Systems" and put all the server and storage product lines under one roof. Over time, we will transition from TotalStorage to System Storage naming. This will occur with new products, and major versions of existing products.

Two other phrases you will hear in the names of our offerings are "Virtualization Engine" and "Express". These are portfolio identifiers. The Virtualization Engine identifier was created to emphasize our leadership in system virtualization, and we have products that span product lines with this identifier.

The Express identifier was created to emphasize our focus on Small and Medium sized business (SMB). It spans not just servers and storage, but across other offerings from other IBM divisions.

Of course, just renaming products and services isn't enough. Systems don't work together just because they have similar names, are covered in similar "Apple white" plastic, or have similar black bezels. Obviously, thoughtful and collaborative design are needed, with the appropriate amounts of engineering and testing. IBM is aligning its server and storage development so that the IBM Systems brand keeps its promise.

The author is wondering whether EMC will try to avoid the fate of Hitachi's mainframebusiness, focusing on "moving into the IBM field" of offering software and services for more complete solutions.

Interestingly, one comment opines that EMC's acquisition of Documentum was "followed" byIBM's acquisition of FileNet, not realizing that IBM already has the leading documentmanagement software (IBM Content Manager).

Another comment cites IBM's recent push of Xen asanother example "following" EMC's acquisition of VMware, again not realizing that IBM has hadLogical Partition (LPAR) capability in its System z, System p and System i server lines formany years.